Taking in Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas’s exhibition in gods we trust is like feeling your way through bits and pieces of enormous counter-narratives that retell hundreds of years of Mexican history. Like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, the offerings that Cuevas gives audiences feel so suggestive of so much more, and everything in the show seems to fit together in some unbelievably complicated way. Juxtaposing elements from ancient Indigenous cultures with 20th-century advertisements by oil conglomerates, and appropriating imagery from Mexico’s most lionized and institutionalized artists, the show pushes audiences to see beneath the surface and connect the dots.
On view at Kurimanzutto New York through 15 April, in gods we trust is a truly ambitious and wide-ranging exhibition. Cuevas framed her work as an attempt to add complexity to an all-too-simple story, bringing back many of the pieces that official accounts have left out. “I wanted to find these more complex narratives – not everything is Aztec,” said Cuevas, laughing. “We don’t know enough about these histories. I wanted to go further than this discourse of the Aztecs and the Mayas. Little by little you get these narratives of economic processes and social history.”
